Forge of Empires Game

Worthwhile Investment

It can be quite a task just finding a real-time strategy game that is worth the amount of time invested in them in the first place (see Kingdom Rush for perhaps the only other title that is truly worth a substantial chunk of your time). Because of the nature of the genre, the amount of time needed to make sufficient progress is often substantial, so people tend to be reluctant to make a leap of faith on something that may very well turn out to be a waste oftime. Many massively multiplayer online games and real-time strategy titles give you a degree of control over the events in them, but ultimately they end up being either too superficial or too time-consuming to be worth the effort. Forge of Empires is one of the few games that makes the investment of time worthwhile because besides its impressive graphics, it offers a range of features such as resource management, turn-based battle scenarios, the building of a town from scratch, and even the opportunity to develop your settlement from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages through actual research that loosely follows the course of human history.

Build Your City

The game begins in the Stone Age with a top-down view of your primitive settlement. At this stage, you only have access to basic buildings and a limited space for your town to fit into. The early stages of the game are explained with a tutorial that guides you through the process of building residential buildings which produce gold coins (the game’s main currency) and production structures that produce the resources required to build pretty much everything in the game. Different buildings need different amounts of gold and resources to be built, and production buildings need a certain amount of the available population to work in them. The careful management of your resources is an aspect of the game which remains prominent, and it is one of the most satisfying elements of the gameplay as well.

Researching Success

The type and range of structures that are available for you to build depend on your level of technological development. The beauty of the game is in the opportunity it gives you to spend forge points (these regenerate at the rate of one per hour) in order to develop new technologies that determine your standing in history. You begin during the Stone Age with minimal technology available to you and simple huts for your people to live in, but as you research new concepts and technologies such as architecture, maths, and military tools, you are able to build better houses such as chalets and roof-tile houses and raise a stronger army with better weapons. The more you research, the further down the timeline of history you travel, going from the Stone Age to the High Middle Ages; a feature unique to this browser-based masterpiece.

Build Your Army

Expansion of your town requires that you scout the surrounding areas and invade them. Invasions take place in the form of a turn-based battle scenario that begins every time you choose to invade a region, but first you need troops to build your army. Military buildings are another building type that can be selected from the in-game menu, and they allow you to produce different kinds of troops, as well as different weapons depending on your level of technological research. You begin with light artillery but the more research that you do, the more military technologies and concepts you discover such as militia, battle formations, heavy melee fighters and well-trained soldiers. The level of control you have over your army is second to none, with many other browser-based games even offering half of the control you get here.

A Unique Experience

The snapshots through time that Forge of Empires allow you experience make it a truly unique real-time strategy game that gives you more control over the day-to-day running of your empire than most other games in existence. Innogames are now tasked with the difficult feat of bettering this title, which after the brilliance of Forge of Empires, is not going to be easy to achieve.